Introduction

With a sense of dread permeating her soul, Greeshma fired up the dashboard to look over Joshua’s work. She’d been hopeful that the performance-improvement plan she and Morgan had established for Joshua would give him some solid guidelines on how to improve, but… looking at the numbers and the code commits from the rest of the team, it clearly wasn’t taking root. His work continued to be shoddy, and the two-month period of the PIP was over.

Being terminated from your job is one of the worst feelings ever. Perhaps the only thing worse than that feeling is being the one doing the terminating.

When we step back and examine most situations in which an employee needs to be separated from the company, there’s really two different kinds of scenarios.

The first is the on-the-spot termination for drastic behavior: Your employee makes a grossly unacceptable comment to another employee. Your employee openly threatens—or worse, carries out—an act of violence against another employee. Your employee tries to access sensitive company information (company secrets or perhaps financial information) that they have absolutely zero right or need to access. There’s a variety of situations, usually described in the company handbook written and distributed by HR, that will merit an immediate termination. Much of the time, your job will consist of contacting HR, providing evidence to the misdeed, and allowing them to handle the situation from there. If your employee does something that’s even tangentially mentioned in the employee handbook, and particularly anything that touches on race, gender, religion, politics, or any of a half-dozen other sensitive topics, contact HR to see if it’s a concern. When in doubt, call HR, and follow their lead.

Having gotten that out of the way, though, these are the rarest sorts of termination scenarios, and (strangely) the most well-documented and well-discussed among HR teams. It’s pretty unlikely you’ll need to deal with this more than once in your career.

The other scenario is the performance-related termination, in which you’ve steadily tried to guide, then warn, your employee to improve their performance, all for naught. You’ve worked with them to craft the performance improvement plan (PIP), but the individual still isn’t measuring up, and now… it’s time.

Layoffs. Truthfully, there’s a third scenario, in which you are required to lay some of your people off due to a larger, executive decision from above you. Usually this is something that you will find out because your boss hands down the requirement, and often there will be some additional considerations around that—sometimes who needs to be laid off will be a part of the message, for example, or what criteria needs to be used for selecting who gets laid off. This is a little outside the scope of this course, since we’re considering performance management here, but suffice it to say that having to terminate somebody whose performance has actually met your expectations is a fair sight worse than firing somebody whose performance hasn’t. About the only positive thing to say about it is that usually the terminated individual doesn’t hold you personally responsible for it, and that means you can take them out for a beer after work and commiserate together.